What was the skin colour of the earliest of the homo species? More relevantly, what was the skin colour of homo sapiens? Would it have been somewhere between black and white? Although modern Man came out of Africa (refer Oppenheimer), it does not mean that our ancestor was black. In fact, the colour of Neanderthal Man was recently assessed as coppery brown. Perhaps, taupe (dark-brownish grey) is the near-norm for humans and many animals (and many of the birds in my district).
I have read that the original colour of mankind was tan (dark honey). Prolonged exposure to the sun (say, at the coast) would obviously darken that skin, but that does not explain black skin colour. Furthermore, relatively dark-skinned people have been reported as resident in Taiwan, on the Chinese mainland, and Central America.
How then explain the whitish people – spread across the globe from East Asia to Europe and further West? Living away from the sun for eons cannot whiten a brown body. A suggested explanation is that a blast of cosmic radiation from a supernova, affecting the terrain centred on the Tropic of Cancer, occurring about 40,000 years ago, resulted in the descendants of the survivors becoming predominantly white (with a more coppery touch in the European peninsula of Asia). The Cosmos, rather than evolution, may have been responsible for all those denied a lovely colouration (I do admit my bias!)
As for black skin, could evolution, working through natural selection, have favoured those humans living in hot, tropical lands who had developed near-black to black skin through random mutation? The trigger for random mutation of our genes may most likely be the torrent of radiation flowing from the sun, as well as from space – and of which we are not aware!
The only explanation left is that the alleged 223 extra-terrestrial genes in Man were predisposed to black skin.
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 